Innovation workgroups, advisory boards / brains trusts, longitudinal studies, elite user / opinion leader research…

An online community is a cherry-picked group of 60-150 participants, who meet within a powerful online research environment specifically designed to support collaboration, co-creation, and social bonding. To ensure success, an online community must have a clear, collective goal, in which both sponsor and participants have a vested interest (e.g. product, service, or brand development / improvement). Ideally, there should also be a potent incentive for participants to exchange ideas and opinions (e.g. shared interest, job focus), and a commitment from the client sponsors to participate. Tasks and questions are semi-structured, moderated, and follow a clear schedule, so commitment is undemanding. For these reasons online communities are ideal for innovation projects involving specialist groups, brains trusts, elite users, or opinion leaders, where participants have time to absorb the corporate perspective, and explore subject areas, exhaustively, and from all angles.

In contrast to traditional research, online communities enable a relationship between you and your participants which is genuinely evolving and reciprocal, and where both parties benefit from mutual understanding and the improvements that result from the dialogue. On a more practical level, an online community offers you a direct, continuous, cost-effective, communication channel to target groups globally, a rapid feedback mechanism, and positive word-of-mouth about your business / organisation and any goals you’ve achieved together.

The nqual team are recognised thought-leaders in online community design and administration, having achieved an unbroken string of successes for blue chips and the public sector, including sites for Microsoft, O2, The NHS, and The Healthcare Commission. We have online community pricing options to suit any budget, ranging from entry-level hosted projects, through to fully branded global communities, and we make it easy for you to upgrade, or grow your solution, without disturbing what you’ve already built. All of our online community solutions are based on our netfluential™ platform, are fully secure and highly adaptable, and include online focus groups, online diaries, polls, file exchange, and social networking features. You can participate in your online community from anywhere in the world, and our moderators will update you with regular, ongoing synopses of site activity, themes, and discussions, on an ongoing basis.